Review of Booksmart (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Booksmart is clarifying for me what it is I like most about a whole bunch of teen comedies in the past couple years.

I think it’s safe to say that for me this has been the most anticipated movie of the year. Wife described it as what Blockers wanted to be, though the fixation in Blockers with the more famous actors who played the parents shifted the focus of the action toward parental relationships and got in the way of the comedy and chemistry of the story’s actual drama,the coming of age story for those high school girls.

Booksmart had elements of what I see to be a new characteristic of female-centered comedies in which the foundations of our protagonist’s environment are basically good, loving, tolerant, understanding, and well-meaning (think Eighth Grade, Hearts Beat Loud, Blockers, all from last year, or even farther back to something like Rage in Placid Lake, where the joke is basically how Placid’s parents are the exact opposite of all other high school comedy parents). We don’t have an outside evil that needs to be vanquished, no racist, homophobic, stuck-up bully to contend with or ignore, no strawmen to proselytize past for the benefit of the audience and no one else. In some ways, the way in which Amy and Molly gain knowledge about the good intentions of others reminds me a lot of one of my other favorite films from this year, Fighting With My Family with Florence Pugh. In that film, there are moments when Saraya respond to perceived slights only to find that she’s struggling against imagined prejudice from her coworkers because she isn’t comfortable in her own skin. It’s a nice reversal of the triumph over adversity, goths vs cheerleaders 80s divide, or in the case of Booksmart, the introverts vs the extroverts, or the enlightened feminists vs the unwoke. Apparently Olivia Wilde talks about this phenomenon in her NPR interview.

Wife says the film doesn’t just copy the genre without presenting a good version of the story itself as with Isn’t it Romantic, but rather, it improves upon a lot of the tropes of the high-school party movie while also creating a new, satisfying kind of story. For instance, she says, the business with the loss of cell phones solves for us a problem after Amy and Molly have had their blowout fight at Nick’s party, because we don’t have to ask, “Why didn’t they just text ‘Sorry’ to one another?” (re-enacting a really boring movie trope). Instead, the two are cut off from one another for the rest of the night and only have a chance to reconnect after a dramatic discovery.

The friends’ resolution at the prison shakes up some interesting tropes as well. Wife and I agree that women-centered comedies of late contain within their winter sequence a moment when friends say to another a true thing but at the wrong time or in the wrong place or in an otherwise hurtful or careless way. In Booksmart, instead of starting the resolution scene with an heartfelt apology, it begins with a joke, which burns off the tension right away, and then each of the girls admits–with a lot of self-awareness–their own culpability for the deterioration of the previous night. Their struggle with self-knowledge is not meant to get in the way of their friendship. Rather, their friendship reinforces their sense of self and gives it clarity.

I don’t think of Booksmart‘s crude humor as being edgelordy in reaction to Superbad. Ann Hornaday from the Washington Post says in an otherwise glowing review, “f-bombs are dropped, fast and furiously, in ‘Booksmart,’ which sometimes feels like it’s straining a little too hard to be as crude as the Apatovian bromances it both imitates and comments on.” Booksmart doesn’t just have **** to give. At times it’s actually pretty dark, e.g. the scene with the delivery guy and the word Amy and Molly use to compel one another to do something no matter what. Wife likes that there wasn’t a prominent journey-for-alcohol scene as with all male-centered high school movies, which I think is right aesthetically and in terms of lived-experience. The ease with which the girls acquire alcohol versus the boys seems to fit and it also means that the film doesn’t get derailed going down well-tread paths of the genre.